


25:  Jericho

by light_source



Series: High Heat [25]
Category: Baseball RPF, Sports RPF
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-09
Updated: 2011-10-09
Packaged: 2017-10-24 10:30:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,552
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/262469
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/light_source/pseuds/light_source
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The goal - Zito doesn’t realize it until the first day of spring training, when he runs into Haren in the parking lot of the newly remodeled Muni stadium - the goal is to build himself into a wall, something hard and impenetrable and enduring, something Haren can’t scale.</p>
            </blockquote>





	25:  Jericho

**January 2006**

Zito’s in the Land Rover at LAX, idling illegally at the last door of the lower-level walkway of Terminal 6. Danny’s flight is late, and by the time Haren finds him, Zito’s been waiting half an hour.

\- That big bald guy’s the same cop as last time, says Danny, sliding into the front seat of the Land Rover after he’s heaved his duffel into the back. - Whatja do, pay him off?

\- There’s a Krispy Kreme on Crenshaw, says Zito. - It’s kinda on the way.

Sure enough, there’s a big green-and-white striped box of doughnuts on the hood of the patrol car.  Several cops, their guns unwieldy on their hips, are clustered around it.

\- Wonder, asks Haren in his slow drawl, - if that works if they pick you up for something serious, like knocking over a liquor store?

\- Don’t know, says Zito, smiling underneath his Ray-Bans, - but we got a couple hours if you wanna find out.

He peels out into the exit lane. The cops wave as they pass.

//

Zito’s always liked the loneliness, the barrenness, of the Mojave desert, especially the way the black night sky is peppered with stars you never see in the city. It’s a fuck of a long drive out there from WeHo, but by the time you get to Coachella, you’re far enough away from Indio and Palm Springs and the suburban nightmare of the Inland Empire to see a different California, a California populated by ageing hippies and retirees and ex-drug-dealers. There's only a few tourists, RVs with Ohio license plates and families taking the kids to the BMX track.

By the time they turn off the 10 toward Cottonwood Spring, the last gas station’s O P E N sign is off and when they go inside, the clerk has just rinsed the coffee pots and turned them upside down on paper towels to dry.

\- What can I do for you boys? She’s got penciled-on eyebrows and a whiskey voice.

Zito hands her two twenties for gas, and while he’s out pumping it, Haren snags a couple of bags of Doritos, some Hershey bars, and a six-pack of Coronas.

\- You from around here? the clerk asks Haren as she’s ringing up his purchase.

\- Nope, says Danny, - raised in Monterey Park, but I been up in the Bay Area awhile.

\- Coulda sworn I seen you before, she says.

Haren smiles. He gets this all the time. He figures it’s either because he looks like the fugitive they saw on _America’s Most Wanted_ or he reminds them of the kid who used to mow their lawn.  

By the time Zito comes back in for the change, Haren’s told her she’s too young to have three grandbabies and she’s told him about the fifty bucks she won in the canasta tournament. He’s also talked her into making them a fresh pot of coffee.

Right now she’s in the back rustling him a copy of last month’s _Sports Illustrated_ from the stack of voided magazines waiting in the storage room to be returned.

\- No charge, hon, she says, - everything in there's already over and done with.  

She hands him the magazine, ringing open the cash-register drawer and slamming it shut. Haren hands Zito a big styrofoam cup of coffee.

When they pull out, Zito sees in the rearview mirror that she’s still standing with her elbows on the counter, watching them.

//

Their contracts forbid them to climb, ropes or no ropes.

But both of them like to bend the rules. When Haren arrived in Oakland in 2005, they’d recognized each other immediately as kindred spirits, partners in crime. Zito remembers: they’d gone out drinking one night after Haren had pitched.  They'd woken up at four in the morning in Haren’s car in a _NO STANDING_ spot alongside Lake Merritt, the windows blanked, neither of them having the foggiest notion how they’d gotten there. Haren had shoved Zito's arm to wake him and fired up the ignition just as a patrol car came around the corner, flashing its lights twice in warning.  As the officer had driven by, he'd wagged his finger at them as though they were naughty schoolboys.

After they’d circled the block to shake the cop, Danny was laughing so hard he’d had to pull over again, coughing, this time into a green-curbed loading zone in front of a liquor store. Zito had slapped Haren on the back to help him get his breath back.  Haren had looked at him, and then reached over.

And at that moment Zito had known.

//

Haren told Zito once that a good climbing partner is rarer than a good wife; your life depends on him, as his does on you. _More than you can say for most marriages,_ Danny’d said, winking at Zito.   

This butte in Joshua Tree is half a mile distant from an old Boy Scout trail that’s been blown almost blank by the January winds. Here, over the last year and a half, they’ve established several climbing routes and named them after their ex-girlfriends according to the degree of difficulty. The pitons they’ve used on those routes - bugaboos, peckers - are still there, hammered into the cracks of the rock, waiting.

Zito’s in charge of buying new ropes, given that they do quite a bit of rappelling, and today the smell of the fresh nylon is making his heart pound with anticipation. He finishes tying the laces on his climbing shoes, double-checks the buckles on his climbing harness and feels to make sure he's got his water and his chalk bag.

This morning, after they'd spent an hour or so walking the perimeter of the butte, scrutinizing the possibilities, Haren had picked out today's route, a new one. Now, in a little more than half an hour, he’s already shimmied fifty feet up a vertical crack.  His tanned hands are dark against the dun-colored stone, and he's fixing a carabiner to the eye of a piton he’s hammered in, the muscles of his back and butt outlined against the fabric of his t-shirt and his climbing pants.

 _\- Belay on,_  Haren shouts, as the rope whistles down and pools on the ground in front of Zito.

//

Haren’s figured out where to pitch the tent on the leeward side of the butte, in a spot that absorbs and releases daylight but is out of the wind. Now, as the sun retreats quickly over the distant western mountains and the wind kicks up, he’s lighting the temperamental little Primus stove that drives Zito crazy. Even though he's six-five, Haren’s deft at small movements, good with his hands, like now, as he slices an apple with his thumb against the knife blade.

\- I’d cut myself to pieces if I tried that, says Zito, watching him, shaking his head.

\- That’s why I’m here, says Haren, grinning. - To protect you from yourself.

After they’re done eating, and Haren pours out the coffee he’s ingeniously coaxed out of the Primus, Zito adds a couple of packets of gas-station sugar and a shot of Bushmill’s to each cup and stirs it gently.

\- Now it's Irish, he says.

\- And Mexican, says Haren, pulling apart the top of a bag of Doritos, - in a nod to my exotic ethnic heritage.

They lift their Sierra cups in a solemn toast to each other.

\- Amazing work by you today, says Haren. - You saved our collective butt.

\- So what are we naming today’s route? asks Zito, licking powdery chip salt off his fingers.

\- Marie, says Haren. - For Marie Lespanaye. Homecoming princess, yearbook editor, student council, blah blah blah, took me seven months, _seven months_ , to get to third base with that girl. And then in May she dumped me for Cal Westbrook, showboating fuck-all of a tight end, two weeks before senior prom. I’m not even gonna tell you the rest of the story cause it’ll make you _weep._

\- It was a bitch, all right, says Zito, - especially the last part, with the overhang. I wasn’t sure we were gonna get around it. I was pretty tired at that point.

\- Yeah - that’s what’s totally Marie Lespanaye about it. The fucking overhang. Just when you think you got home, standing up, you get held up at third. He pauses. - I was ready to turn around. Wasn’t for you, we wouldna made it.

What they don't talk about is what happened after they’d wrangled with the overhang for forty-five minutes. There'd seemed to be no doable route. Haren was tired, his hands numb and aching, and in a moment of inattention he’d lost his purchase, fallen back and out, full swing into the air.

Zito had belayed him, talked him through his panic.  It was the sound of Zito's voice, even more than what he was saying, that'd steadied him.  When the blood had come pulsing back into Haren's brain and then into his hands and feet, so had the familiar buzz of desire to be up and at it.  

The deep connection between them lives and grows in what they don't say.

Zito smiles. - If Marie Whatsername could see you now, he says, - whatdya think she’d say?

\- She wouldn’t believe it, says Haren, grinning. - Any of it.

\- Not even the beard? says Zito. - You can’t have had that in high school already, dude.

They’re perched on the same rock, so it’s easy for Zito to turn his head and shoulders, his eyes wide on Haren’s, and they’re silent for moment, gathering themselves.

Zito slips his hand under Haren’s flannel collar, around his warm, beard-stubbled neck, and then they both know exactly how to tip their noses so their mouths join up with a surge of heat, in a kiss that feels like everything else in their relationship, destined. The taste of Danny’s mouth is so inviting, so like his own - whiskey, coffee, corn, salt - that in some remote way, Zito wonders if he’s made Haren up, and one day he’ll just fade away like fog.   Haren groans a little, his tongue wrestling Zito’s, his big hands suddenly everywhere, and they’re strong, those hands.

Zito sighs into Haren's mouth, exactly happy.

Zito likes to complain about the way Haren’s beard never sleeps - and right now his five o’clock shadow is scraping Zito’s chin - but there’s something about it that speaks entirely of maleness, the essence of what he loves about Haren.

\- Long winter, murmurs Zito, his nose buried in the skin beneath Haren’s ear, - _I forgot what you felt like._

\- Not fucking likely, says Haren, his tongue flicking a streak beneath Zito’s jawline, his mouth coming to rest on Zito’s lower lip, sucking sensuously in a way that makes Zito’s breath come faster. - I know you dream about me every night.

Haren’s eyes, even in the firelight, are intensely grey-blue. Zito’s lips curl into a smile and Haren looks at him a moment, smiling himself. His hands are in Zito's long-from-winter hair, knotting, pulling Zito towards him. Then he takes Zito’s mouth with a kiss that’s wider, and deeper, than Zito could possibly grin, and Zito’s gone.

//

Zito stumbles out of the tent just before dawn to take a piss, his head pounding and his mouth paper-bag dry. The sky is moonless but starry, the air as decisive as a surgeon’s knife. He smiles a little, remembering, thinking of the preposterous awkwardness of lovemaking in tents and sleeping bags.  

But when Zito unzips the tent door and crawls back into the soothing warmth of his down bag, he feels like he's finally home.  

//

The morning of the drive back, Zito senses something’s coming, because Haren’s strangely quiet, and he hasn’t looked at Zito since they turned back onto the freeway. It’s easier to say the tough stuff when you’re driving because you need to keep your eyes on the road; Zito knows because he’s done it himself. He pulls in a long breath and lets it out.

\- So what's up? Zito asks.

He can tell by the way Haren's hands tighten on the wheel that his hunch is correct.

//

Zito feels like he's being fired rather than dumped. It's weirdly, impossibly bureaucratic.  Haren appears to have rehearsed a standard set of options _\- it’s not you, it’s me, I need to make a change, I’ve gotten to that point in my life when it’s time to settle down, I’m not the best person for you._

Zito knows that there’s no point in arguing or interrupting. Better just to let him blow through the whole script of blame-shifting excuses.  Let all the words crash to the floor and explode and leak all over the place.

\- So what’s her name? asks Zito after a good long time.

Zito wants a fight and he’s pretty sure this’ll bring it.

\- That’s not the point, says Haren.

\- What is? asks Zito.

\- There’s no future in this, says Haren. - I need to get a life. I’m sick of sneaking around.

\- Fuck that shit, Danny. You sound like a girl, says Zito. - What, you want a ring? A big wedding with all the cousins and the white dress?

He knows it’s a low blow, but he’s still reeling and he needs to grab onto something he recognizes.

\- You know exactly what I’m talking about, says Haren slowly, as though this is also an item he’s rehearsed. He rubs his eyes and temples as though his head hurts.

\- When did breaking the rules become something you don’t do? asks Zito.

Haren sighs. - I don’t know.  It’s not like I woke up one morning and just decided.  I guess it’s been coming awhile, I just been ignoring it.

\-  It's not like it's something I wanna do, he says, his voice hoarse.

Zito can't look at him.

\- So what’s her name?  

\- Jessica, says Haren.

Beyond words, Zito sinks back into his reserves, groping for a toehold.

//

He knows he won’t see Haren again until spring training in February.

Zito spends that January pushing himself so hard in his workouts that, for awhile, every night he falls asleep from pure exhaustion. Bench press, miles of crawl and butterfly, wind sprints, super-heated Bikram yoga that's designed to wring out your emotions along with your body.

As long as he's working himself this hard, he doesn’t have to think.

Some nights he's so tired he doesn’t even make it to bed. He wakes up in the middle of the night and the living-room lights are blazing, his neck cricked from the odd angle against the couch, the TV blabbering like a village idiot.

Then, three weeks into this madness, extending his stride by taking stadium stairs at USC two at a time, Zito pulls a groin muscle.  For a few days the pain's so intense he can hardly walk.  

But a few days later he's running again, stanching the pain with Percocet, getting to sleep finally at two a.m. with an Ambien and two shots of Jack.

The goal - and he doesn’t realize it until the first day of spring training, when he runs into Haren in the parking lot of the newly remodeled Muni stadium - the goal is to build himself into a wall, something hard and impenetrable and enduring.  Something that Haren can’t scale.  That no one can.

A wall from the top of which Zito can begin to see the prospect of his own life, its shape still a mystery to him.

 

 


End file.
